Tamil Academic Anantha Chandrakasan Named Dean of Prestigious MIT School of Engineering

Born in Chennai, India, Anantha Chandrakasan, moved to the US during high school. He was the Vannevar Bush Professor and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT before being named dean of its School of Engineering, which will take effect July 1.

“I always knew I wanted to be an engineer and a professor,” he says. “My mother really inspired me into an academic career. When I entered graduate school, I knew on day one that I wanted to be academic professor.”

Chandrakasan earned his bachelor’s (1989), master’s (1990), and doctoral (1994) degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley — the latter two after being rejected from MIT’s graduate program, he notes with a laugh. After joining the MIT faculty, he was the director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) from 2006 until he became the head of EECS in 2011.

Chandrakasan is a recipient of awards including the 2009 Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) University Researcher Award, the 2013 IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits, an honorary doctorate from KU Leuven in 2016, and the UC Berkeley EE Distinguished Alumni Award. He was also recognized as the author with the highest number of publications in the 60-year history of the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), the foremost global forum for presentation of advances in solid-state circuits and systems-on-a-chip. Since 2010, he served as the ISSCC Conference Chair. A fellow of IEEE, in 2015 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.